Bathish or Bat-heesh : learning to be modern at the Syrian Protestant College -

Abstract

My project charts the historical context of conflicts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that coincided with the founding of the Syrian Protestant College (SPC) in Beirut. I am interested in documenting how two college crises expose the redefinition of missionary work by examining a multitude of views on modernity and liberalism manifest at SPC. My project contributes to debates on how the faculty and the students adopt political liberalism differently, both of who maintain their religious and moral views, but also engage in social cooperation for the advancement of SPC. I fill a gap in the critical literature of exposing crucial turning points in the transnational history that influenced the founding of a university at the peripheries of the Ottoman Empire. The ensuing discussion reveals the silent context and often overlooked students that defined the onset of intellectualism in contemporary Beirut, where AUB remains an important intellectual space in the Middle East and North Africa.